


Longitudes

by Factoids



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-04-15 01:47:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4588365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Factoids/pseuds/Factoids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.</p><p>- Henry David Thoreau </p><p>She tries to think of anything she might have heard about him but who would even think to tell her? Robb would have called her if Jon had been hurt or killed, but it’s been five years since Robb died and seven since she was able to speak to him. Plenty of time for a soldier to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Her phone is heavy in her hand as she thumbs through contacts, scrolling up and down at random in some bizarre game of roulette where it gets harder and harder not to cry every time one of the names she lands on is dead. She remembers wishing so hard to be able to just call someone, just one call, and now that her phone is here and she knows there won’t be a hand gliding over her shoulder and a soft voice asking who she’s calling, she can’t think of one person to call.

She passes the endless list of Tyrells who had swooped in on a cloud of rosepetals and given her a taste of her freedom, none of whom she had heard from since Margery became the new principal dancer at Kings. They were cunning and ambitious, but also kind and she hopes they knew what they were getting into with the Lannisters. Her friendship with Margery wasn’t long, but it was the only time since leaving home she could remember having fun and even if Margery hadn’t been willing to risk her new position to keep Sansa as a friend, she had been willing to flash the entire corps to allow her a moment of weakness without prying eyes. Just because it ended didn’t mean it wasn’t good.

She can never bear to remove the Stark names from her contacts, even though she knows none of the numbers work anymore and she forces her last conversation with Robb from her mind as she taps his name and stares at his grinning face and remembers that she’s older than him now.

The Greatjon was with her mother and Robb, but no one seemed to know or care if he was killed as well. She likes to imagine he’s back home with the Smalljon, terrifying small children with his unrestrained laughter but she won’t risk calling and finding out she’s wrong. She helped him add all the numbers to his phone while Robb and Theon laughed that he didn’t need a phone, it would be easier for him to just try to whisper and they’d all hear him.

There is one name she stops over so many times it stops looking like a name, like when you say a word so many times it just becomes noise.

Jon Snow

It sounds like a fake name made up by someone with no imagination in the middle of winter, or maybe Jack Frost’s cousin.

Jon Snow who was Robb’s best friend since the cradle and who gave Arya her first boxing lessons in secret when she was much too young and who never ever spoke to Sansa but still obligingly learned and helped her practice every lift fifty times when Robb couldn’t or wouldn’t, even though he didn’t know the difference between an arabesque and a plié and Sansa was dismissive at best outside the studio.

Jon Snow who went off to fight the good fight just weeks before she left for the capital and who she hasn’t seen since.

Jon Snow who has probably changed his number and moved and forgotten Robb’s little sister who never left the studio for more than an hour at a time except to sleep.

Jon Snow who is probably dead by now.

She tries to think of anything she might have heard about him but who would even think to tell her? Robb would have called her if Jon had been hurt or killed, but it’s been five years since Robb died and seven since she was able to speak to him. Plenty of time for a soldier to die.

She presses down on the name anyway, much harder than the screen needs, and hits speakerphone, resting the phone on her knees, drawn up to her face and closing her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at his picture when his stupid awkward answerphone message he recorded at fifteen begins playing, or worse, when it doesn’t play and someone in the Riverlands picks up and she realizes there is nothing of him left for her to call.

“‘Lo? ‘sit?” Jon’s voice is deeper than it used to be and Sansa doesn’t quite manage to breathe in the pause that follows his mumbled greeting, slurred and sleepy and probably delivered before opening his eyes. Jon is possibly the only person she knows who will pick up the phone at who even knows what hour and not check the caller ID. Not that it would have helped him now because solid, dependable, Jon hasn’t changed his number, but she’s changed hers twice since they spoke last. She hears rustling and a stifled groan and she imagines Jon sitting up and Ghost stepping on him for daring to disturb his sleep. “Hello?” He manages the full word this time and a drop falls onto the smiling picture of him at some picnic they had late in the summer before she left.

“Jon, can you come pick me up?” It’s ridiculous because she’s twenty now and for all that he was Robb’s brother he was barely her friend eight years ago and he’s probably half a world away dealing with war and death and all kinds of problems that aren’t stupid crying ballerinas who got themselves in over their heads at eleven and never made it above water again and who still haven’t managed to tell him who it is that’s calling him to tearfully beg him to come pick them up when everyone should be sleeping.

There’s a slam and then muttered curses followed closely by apologies that tug at the corners of her mouth even if she can’t quite manage a smile. “Sansa?” It’s gruff and a little hoarse and so undeniably northern she can barely stand it because no one has said her name like that since Winterfell. No one says her name at all anymore. “Sansa, where are you? Are you safe?” She does start laughing as she hears him set the phone down and start moving around because  _of course_  she isn’t safe, she can’t even remember safe, and  _of course_  Jon would just roll out of bed, intent on coming to find her as soon as she breathed a word because when she wanted to be a pretty princess twirling her way across a stage all he wanted was to save people and be  _good_.

“I’m sorry. I’m being ridiculous. I shouldn’t have woken you. I’m fine, Jon.” It’s probably even true. She’s felt like she’s drowning for years and nothing has happened yet. Maybe knowing there is someone there who would come for her is enough. She can’t make Jon drive from wherever he is to pull her from the mess she’s made for herself. “Truly, you should go back to bed.” She can hear him frowning as he repeats his questions until she tells him where the studio is and promises to go to the diner down the street where it’s brightly lit and there are people.

“Get off Ghost. We’re going for a walk.” It takes him several more tries to convince the wolf to get off whatever item of clothing Jon was after and Sansa snorts, remembering six wolf pups tumbling around the yard and wondering how big Ghost must be now.

“He’ll be cross with you for lying.” The teasing in her tone probably surprises him as much as it does her, because even if it wasn’t the middle of the night and she wasn’t crying and it hadn’t been years since they spoke, friendly teasing had never been something they did and this conversation might already be the longest one they’ve had without someone else being involved.

“He’ll forgive me when he sees you.” It’s a mix of matter of fact and sweet and it warms her a little. “Besides, where he just trod he deserves some disappointment. I may never have children, Sansa.” She giggles and manages to sound like she isn’t seconds away from another crying jag this time and the relief is palpable when he sighs into the receiver.

“Oh don’t be such a baby Jon. He’s just showing affection.”

“See if I hold him back when we get there, and you can see how affectionate he is.” He hangs up once she tells him she’s safely in the diner and that no one looks threatening, but not before telling her he’ll be there in a couple of hours.

He isn’t there two hours later, and she orders a fourth cup of coffee even though the waitress assures her they won’t kick her out if she switches to water. Her coffee is almost gone by the time he gets there fifteen minutes later. It’s still much too fast. The last she heard of Jon he’d been far up north. He should be days away. Not to mention he hadn’t chosen a profession that allowed him to go running off into the night whenever he pleased.

He doesn’t move in for a hug when he finds her and she’s not surprised, because he’s always been good with personal boundaries, but she is relieved. She stands and presses a kiss to his cheek, one hand resting on his upper arm and she’s happy with that. It’s a warm greeting, familiar, and she doesn’t want leave room for doubts of his welcome, but it is easier than allowing arms around her.

She falls back on her heels, not quite as hard as she expects because for all that he looks vastly different, looking at his face made her feel twelve and he’s not quite so much taller than her anymore. “Where were you that you could get here so fast?” She waves over to the waitress to indicate she’s ready to pay. “Unless you want something? Coffee for the road maybe?”

“No, no I’m fine. I was in Riverrun.” She can’t think of a reason for him to have been in Riverrun, but it is  _feasible_  to get there in just over two hours, if not legal. He flushes slightly under her look. “I might have speeded.” She almost hugs him again when he genuinely looks a little guilty about it. “How are you?” He asks, shouldering her bag while she hands over a handful of bills with a smile and well wishes and heads for the door.

“I’ve been well.” It sounds a little ridiculous to her own ears, and probably worse to his, considering why he’s even there in the first place, but the casual response slips out before she can even think of a real one. “Still dancing, you know, much of the same.”

He snorts and gives her a crooked grin. “Well you didn’t learn to lie like them, that’s for sure.” Jon had always held a kind of disdain for the kind of people she had spent her childhood idolizing that managed to be both vicious and unconcerned. The distinction of _them_  and his unthinking separation of her from that group like he hasn’t for a moment considered that she might have become part of it comforts her as much as it would once have irked her.

“Didn’t I? Maybe I meant for you to think exactly what you’re thinking.” She pouts for a second, because she has learned to lie, she hasn’t said anything true to anyone since she saw Ned Stark die, but she doesn’t want to lie to Jon. Jon is safe and on her side and she should be allowed to just be honest for once, even if she can’t quite remember how. “Or maybe you’re the only thing I have left of home and I just need you to still think I’m a good person.” She tries to dismiss the voice at the back of her mind telling her she’s doing well, that that is exactly what he needs to hear.

“Oh Sansa. You  _are_  a good person. You always were.” He sounds as sure of that as she used to be, but it gets harder and harder to tell. She’s good at things, always has been, but she’s not sure she was ever just  _good._  She’s never really been bad either, she supposes, just good at taking directions and when those directions were good, so was she. Malleable. It’s what they all saw in her after all. A thousand girls are pretty and good at dancing, but how many will contort themselves into whatever people ask of them?

“I was stuck up and immature and you know it.” It’s half apology, half distraction.

He dismisses the subject easily, always careful never to set foot where he may not be wanted. “You were a child, children are supposed to be immature.” He opens the passenger side door of a car that is old but well cared for and Ghost’s massive form presses forward between seats and onto the pavement to nudge at her, tongue lolling out. “Back in the car you great ugly brute.”

Jon attempts to coax Ghost back into the back seat as Sansa settles in, moving the pile of worn black leather that seemed to have occupied her place on Jon’s drive to her. “Is this the same jacket?”

“Uh, no.” He drops into the driver’s side and she’s amused to note he’s blushing and tugging on the curls at the back of his neck.

“I figured it had to be a new one, your shoulders did not look like that when you were 16. It looks so similar though.” She remembers buying him that jacket, after glaring at him for a week when she had seen him driving his new dirt bike in his ugly old windbreaker. She had refused to wrap it and handed it over with the same disapproving glare lest he think she was happy about the situation.

“Yeah, I found a new one.”

“I knew I was right about that jacket. It suits you. Do you still have that evil monstrosity that went with it?” She might have more understanding of his desire for freedom now, and the reasoning behind his chosen mode of transport, but there was something about going out into traffic unprotected that did not sit well with her.

He grins at her and she can practically see him remembering her, age twelve, lecturing him on road safety. “No, I tend to stick to four wheels these days.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” She almost reaches out to slap him for the laugh he lets out when Ghost apparently decides he is being ignored and near chokes her as he shoves his head between her headrest and the door, resting it on the seat belt until she adjusts it. When he settles on her shoulder she scratches behind his ear, murmuring endearments under her breath and determinedly not thinking about Lady. “So what were you doing in Riverrun?”

“I’ve been working for your mother’s uncle.”

“Brynden? I never met him. Is he nice?”

“He’s a good man. I’m pretty sure he hates me, but he’ll be thrilled to meet you, I know that.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t hate you.”

“It’s alright, I’m not taking it too personally. I haven’t been a big fan of me lately either.”

“Well you should be. Showing up here like a knight in shining armour, it’s fan-worthy stuff. So what has my uncle got against you?”

“I showed up with a dishonorable discharge certificate in my pocket. Your uncle isn’t keen on deserters and their ilk, not to mention your mother never liked me much and he loved her. He was one of Robb’s greatest supporters when everything was going on and I wasn’t there and I survived. He’s not hurting for reasons to hate me.”

“Who in their right mind would give you a dishonorable discharge? On what grounds?” Somehow she feels personally offended by the term dishonorable being applied to Jon and she can’t get it to fit him at all. He smiles at her indignation and she can’t help but think that he used to be surlier. He seems sad now, like a deep undercurrent that shows through all his movements, but he smiles and laughs genuinely and often and it soothes her.

“I ordered my men to stand down and allow the free folk passage.”  _That doesn’t sound particularly dishonorable_ , she thinks, but doesn’t say, because it’s not like he discharged himself and arguing his case to him is pointless when that statement raises so many questions.

“That was you? Exactly how high ranking did you get?” There is a bizarre surge of pride at the realization that he rose so high by age twenty three that he was even able to do something so monumental, even if he apparently wasn’t allowed. “That news made it all the way down here and into sheltered dance studios. What happened up there? I mean what’s going on that there are so many refugees coming?”

Apart from grumbling about the refugees themselves (usually in less flattering terms), there has been very little news from the northern border and the stories Jon has (not quite stories but she could weave stories out of his short answers) are shocking and she turns her face into Ghost’s fur at times but she keeps asking until she has heard everything he seems willing to share.

He turns to glance at her as they lapse into silence. “So, the hair? I drove past the theatre to find you. Alayne?” Her face was on the marquee, Petyr had grown bold lately, too bold maybe. Jon has turned back to the road and she knows with absolute certainty that if she remains silent he will pretend nothing was said. Even if she snaps at him he will just let it drop.

“Baelish.” She says, finally. “That man who grew up with mum. I don’t know if you ever met him. He brought me here while the Lannisters were burning the world down around them to avenge their precious golden boy. He said Cercei suspected me. I don’t know if she ever did, but she certainly didn’t like me. Technically you might be harboring a fugitive. I really should find out if anything ever came of that.” The whole event seems very distant now, not entirely real.

“Tyrion Lannister was convicted, disappeared before they managed to get him though.”

She hums, more of an acknowledgement than any real response. She finds it hard to invest much emotion into Lannisters these days, relatively good or no. “I’m glad. He didn’t do it.”

“You know who did?” He tenses and frowns a little and she’s not sure if he thinks she did it. He would probably be upset if she had, she decides. She can’t imagine him not caring about murder, even Joffrey’s.

“Baelish and his friends.” And Baelish is gone now. She doesn’t mention the Tyrells, doesn’t blame them for whatever involvement they had.

She drifts off and when he wakes her he is already pulling up to an old three story building.

“You take the bed, try to get some sleep.” She opens her mouth, even though she knew this was coming. “You can fight me on it tomorrow. I have to get to work in about an hour, I’m just going to catch a nap. You on the other hand, should get a good night’s rest.” He’s already folding down the back of the corduroy clad couch.

She fists a hand in Ghost’s fur as she watches him grab pillows and blankets from a cupboard. “I’m sorry I made you drive all night.” It’s barely loud enough to carry across the small room but he stops short and makes his way to her, reaching out but still not touching her.

“Hey now, don’t apologize. Hearing your voice when you called…If I had to drive to Dorne to come get you it still would have been more than worth it.” She throws her arms around his neck, clinging tightly for a second but pulls away before he has a chance to react.

“Good night, Jon.”

She doesn’t fall asleep.

She draws the curtains, can’t stand the thought of someone looking in.

She flicks the lights back on and scans the titles of the books on the shelf above his bed.

She opens the curtains, because she has to know if someone is there.

She opens the door to check that Jon is still resting quietly on the couch.

Once she hears the harsh beeping of his alarm she dodges past him into the kitchen while he heads to the bathroom and sets about preparing scrambled eggs and toast, flicking on the coffee maker and digging out plates and cutlery. It’s a point of pride that the table is set, complete with a stainless steel travel mug when he comes out showered, shaved, and dressed in pressed slacks and a white shirt.

Jon stares at her and she’s forgotten what it feels like to have someone just be impressed and grateful with nothing else poisoning it and the look on his face reminds her why she spent so much of her childhood trying to please people. It’s been too long since she had someone worth fussing over.

“I can sleep after you leave.” She won’t. The window will still be there and now Jon won’t be between her and the front door or the other windows, but he doesn’t need to know that. She’ll figure it out eventually, she always does. “I thought it might be nice to have breakfast together.”

She sends him off with a freshly filled mug and a packed lunch, shoving a bottle of water into his bag, and he responds with a kind of baffled smile and reassurances that she doesn’t have to do any of this but he seems to accept it for the expression of gratitude and affection that it is.

It takes minutes for the walls to start closing in on her when Jon isn’t there to keep them steady and getting back in bed seems stifling so she distracts herself first with cleaning up the kitchen, building a mental inventory and planning dinner as she goes.

She sits for a moment, tapping fingers against the solid wood of the table before shifting her focus to the room’s only other inhabitant.

“Maybe we should go for a run? What do you think? You were such a good boy last night, coming with Jon to get me. I think we should find you a park.” She grabs her gym clothes and one of Jon’s sweatshirts because there was frost on the grass when they came in and she leaves a note for Jon, just in case he comes back for something.

Ghost runs circles around her, rolling happily in the damp grass and bounding after shadows but never straying far from her side. “You know I remember when I was faster than you.” She huffs, dropping onto the ground, breathing heavily. Ghost licks her face and drops down on top of her. “Gods Ghost you’re big as a horse, give a girl some warning.” When Ghost’s ears perk up and she thinks she hears feet pounding across pavement she runs back so fast she’s afraid her knees will give out on the stairs and she wishes for the thousandth time that she was more like Robb or Jon or Arya or anyone who wasn’t afraid of their own shadow.

When Jon comes back she is curled up on the couch, halfway through reading  _Call of the Wild_ aloud to the wolf resting his head in her lap.

He doesn’t mention her great uncle or uncle over dinner and she realizes he hasn’t told anyone she’s there. If she doesn’t want to see anyone he won’t make her. She reads them both Thoreau while Jon does the dishes and doesn’t stop until he settles down in his plaid flannel pajama bottoms and his breathing evens out.

When she retreats back to his bed the window is still there and the bed is still at the wrong angle from the door and gets up and lays back down half a dozen times before she tiptoes out to the couch carefully stepping over Jon. She doesn’t like the window so near her feet, but Ghost comes to rest just under it and she drifts off with her eyes flicking slowly between the door and the window over Jon’s chest. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Sansa hides out in Jon’s bed, rarely leaving the flat and never stepping outside it alone, for a week before Jon takes her in to work to introduce her to Brynden Tully. It’s awkward and distant and leaves a bitter aftertaste because they’re family and they’re getting something of that back but not a part they loved. She’s pleased and she can muster up some excitement over knowing the man her mother held in such high esteem, but he’s not Robb or her mother or her father. Sansa has never felt like more of a disappointment and the apologetic lilt to everything he says tells her she’s not alone.

Edmure takes one look at her over the threshold when they come over for tea and breathes out ‘Cat’ and it feels petty to resent him for something she would have beamed at a few years ago, but she does it anyway.

Her uncles are kind, welcoming, and generous and not even remotely familiar. She would have loved to meet Edmure when she was younger, and she suspects he would have happily doted on a little red headed niece, and Brynden would have been a comfort to have with his stern and solid presence. Their meeting now is somewhere between too late and too soon and her polite refusal of their perfunctory offer of staying with them is a visible relief to everyone at the table, though the conversation remains stilted and they retire early.

She’s not sure if it’s worse that Brynden’s eyes scream that she’s not Catelyn or that Edmure’s seem to assert that she is.

Afterwards, in his kitchen, Jon hands her a beer and tells her it gets easier. She remembers her mother’s hair and eyes were his best friend’s as well and she regrets dying it back.

“You should wear more colors.” She says, instead of addressing the newly pathetic state of her family.

His lips quirk up. “You don’t say?” When he was fourteen the answer was always a gruff ‘I like black’ and what he would probably not acknowledge was at least half a pout. Now he always smiles when she says and does things she used to.

“Just because I was a child doesn’t mean I was wrong. Even just navy, dare to break the monochrome, Jon. You should trust me on these things.” She insists, gesturing with the bottle held loosely between thumb and middle finger. “Remember the jacket? Girls were flirting with you for weeks until they realized you still weren’t going to talk to them.”

“I can honestly say no one has ever put as much effort into getting me laid as you did.”

She swats at his shoulder and gives him an affronted look. “I was not trying to get you laid!”

“Really? _Jon, always compliment a girl’s name when she gives it_.” His voice doesn’t rise into that annoying squeak Arya’s always did when she was imitating Sansa, but he does straighten his posture and adopt a passable southern accent that isn’t anywhere near hers and she wonders briefly what kind of TV Jon has been watching that his go-to accent is a rich kid from the Reach. “ _Jon, don’t say um, if you don’t know what to say just don’t speak and you may come off as mysterious rather than just awkward_.”

“I stand by that one. Although awkward can be cute.” **  
**

“You were forever trying to make me cooler. Or instill manners. Or Both. _Always arrive early if you’re meeting someone, but exactly on time if you’re visiting_.”

“Clearly I gave only excellent advice, and manners are cool, I’ll have you know.” She shoves at his shoulder and feels a smirk tug at her lips as he shoots her a faux wounded look. “So did you end up getting laid?”

He snorts into his beer at the question. “I did, yeah, thanks for asking. To be perfectly honest though I don’t think they were much impressed by my manners.”

“And is there a girl?” There certainly isn’t one living with him, but there might be one about somewhere, presumably getting annoyed by now with her monopolizing his time (not to mention his bed).

“There was one.”

“What was her name? Where did you meet? What happened?” She’s already building a preemptive dislike for the girl based on the past tense alone, but she is interested because there was one, and that sounds a little monumental. Jon has always struck her as a romantic. Not that he showed any interest at all in dating as far as she knew, but he was idealistic in a way that she felt was uniquely suited to epic love stories.

“Ygritte. We met while I was at the Academy. She’s...she’s dead.”

“Oh Jon, I’m so sorry.” She runs a hand over his arm, searching her mind for anything else to say, anything anyone had said to her that didn’t feel hollow and insincere, and coming up completely blank.

He gives a half shrug and a smile and it it’s not unaffected it’s just the only way you can look after a certain point and Jon just can’t stop losing. “We weren’t even together at the time. I hoped we might be eventually but we’d been broken up for a while. She shot me, you know. Three times. Hurt like a bitch.” He rubs his thumb over a spot above his knee distractedly as he speaks and she decides that must have been one of the times.

“She shot you?” She tenses, can feel every inch of her tighten and Joffrey smirks as he aims a gun right at her head and she can’t breathe at all but Jon shrugs and gives half a sheepish grin and it looks almost like it’s a fond memory so she tries to settle herself and and relax back into her seat.

“Might have deserved it.” She wants to ask what he can possibly have done to warrant that and she wants him to say he cheated or he left her or he forgot her birthday or something that justifies the joking tone but there will always be Joffrey and Petyr and she wishes she couldn’t imagine Jon in their places but she can and no amount of knowing he won’t hurt her will take away the fact that he can do it so easily. He’s bigger and stronger and he’s housing her and feeding her and Jon can’t be someone who deserves a woman’s bullets. He can’t be.

She’s _safe_.

She keeps trying to breathe slowly, calmly, and she doesn’t let herself pull back but Jon does retreat and he looks so hurt it sends a pang through her and she knows her face has given her away. He can see she’s scared of him and she can’t deny it. She can’t tell him it’s just some memory he triggered. She can’t even make herself reach out and touch him.

“I’m sorry.” It’s the only thing she can manage and it only makes him look more heartbroken and she pinches the skin on the inside of her wrist and tries to reign in the frustration and dejection at what she has made of a light hearted bonding moment.

Neither of them knows where to take a conversation from there so they both start preparing for bed in silence and when Sansa stops him from folding the couch down again he sighs but doesn’t argue as he follows her back to the bedroom. She owes him an explanation or an apology or something but she keeps quiet and pretends she can’t tell he’s not sleeping. He pretends not to notice the box of dark dye that appears in her side of the bathroom cabinet the next time she goes to the store.

They both pretend she’s fine.

Everything gets easier when she gets a job. She’s never had one but her practiced smiles and penchant for organization let her fall into her new role as receptionist, at a company whose most important characteristic is having nothing to do with her family, with ease. She feels less like a burden somehow, inexplicably, despite the fact that she is still invading every part of his life and not contributing anything financially.

They settle into patterns, or she weaves her way into his, she’s not sure, but the domesticity of their new routine makes her smile.

She catches herself filling in parts of their pasts with new stories; less sensational and more sweet. Paving over years in the care of the Lannisters with a charming boarding school in the Stormlands where nothing ever happened. Inventing names and families who are unremarkable and distant but fine and alive and Sansa has always been the best at lying to herself.

Most days she looks at Jon and she knows he would do anything to spare her more pain. He would be horrified at the very mention of the things that make her stiffen and look away. On good days she feels guilty about the limbo she’s keeping him in and worse about her suspicion of him.

Some days all she can hear is soft whispers.

_Joffrey was perfect too._

_Robb’s best friend, because Robb was_ never _wrong about who to trust._

_He hasn’t hurt you_ yet _._

_You haven’t said anything he disapproved of. You will. You always do._

_He doesn’t enjoy the pain of others but he hasn’t seen yours, little dove, he hasn’t seen true terror in your eyes and how pretty you are when you cry._

_Such a trivial thing, the snapping of hollow bones. Could be accidental. He might just tire of handling you like glass._

_He doesn’t know what it is to watch you break. Beautiful and tragic and so_ terribly _easy._

But most days she knows.

She meets his friends, not the ones he talks about who are dead or north or south or anywhere but nearby, but Dacey Mormont and Smalljon Umber. Smalljon she remembers, though nowhere near as well as his father. They both came south with Robb and never went back. Trust Jon to find the only northerners in the city, and secessionists to boot. They manage to go remarkably long stretches of time without mentioning Robb for a group of people where everyone is aware that he is their closest link.

They start going out to bars where Sansa can dance and they can all drink until they’re prepared to join her.

Old war stories, literal and figurative, prove Jon to be much less like her father than people used to say he was. He has the same drive to do what is right, but he’s at once more and less flexible. He’s willing to bend and blur and cross lines on his way where her father had pushed forward firmly within the lines even if they kept him from his goals. Both unyielding but Jon’s determination is ferocious where Ned’s was calm.

Neither of them has ever been careful.

Sansa learns to relax again gradually. She doesn’t share as much as they do, not at first, because they went into their wars as fighters and she went into hers a victim and she’s never acquired a taste for pity, but she allows herself to trust them enough to move around crowded rooms and even occasionally have a drink with them.

It is several drinks before Jon is going to deign to dance to techno that she looks around the room and notices eyes following the movement of his fingers around his sweating pint glass while he stares into the middle distance rather than involve himself in whatever Dacey is gesturing passionately about. “Well if it’s ever going to be said that I tried to get you laid, I want it to be said that I did it well.” She states, sliding up behind him and dropping her chin onto his shoulder, speaking directly into his ear rather than try to raise her voice.

Jon snorts but gamely lets her drag him over to the girl she caught eyeing him. “Of course you do. You’re _Sansa Stark_.” She makes her way back to Dacey and Smalljon in time for the dramatic conclusion of something to do with bears and her mother and grins as she watches the girl, Elinore, rest a dainty hand on his arm as he taps what she can only assume is his number into her phone.

Everything feels almost painfully normal for a while, the kind of normal she wished for but couldn’t quite picture while she was still with Petyr. She has friends who only care about her family because they were friends with them too. She has a job in an office that is better than she expected and no one mentions the trust fund that she should have access to because all the trustees are dead but doesn’t because everyone thought she was too. She goes weeks without thinking about anything outside the city limits of Riverrun save for Jon’s work with the relief efforts around the Riverlands.

Then she sees a gossip rag while she’s picking up groceries with Loras Tyrell’s face across it and mentions of a wedding and she remembers what normal actually is for her and Jon comes home to find her hugging Ghost.

“Sansa, what’s wrong?” He’s worried. He always jumps straight to worried and works his way back from there.

“I don’t know, Jon! Why did you come get me? Why are you letting me stay here?” She hasn’t asked, for months now she hasn’t asked because she knows the answer but the tiny chance that she is wrong is so terrifying.

Jon seems more bemused than anything as he sits down across from her. “I need reasons for that?”

“Yes! Everyone has reasons, Jon. You came and collected me, no questions asked. You took me here. You don’t force me to go anywhere or talk about anything. Gods Jon, you let me move into your bed.” She keeps talking faster and louder and her gestures turn frantic and she knows if she keeps going she’s going to say something she regrets before long because she’s still thinking things about Jon that would devastate him. “That is not a thing people do! You’re going above and beyond being a good person here. A good person could easily leave me with my uncles, it’s not like your choices are this or complete abandonment but you just keep letting me take whatever I want! I have looked so hard for anything, _anything_ , wrong with you that could explain why you would do this and despite every horrible thing that has happened to you the only thing that isn’t perfectly well adjusted is your inexplicable hoarding of torches! I keep waiting for something to snap and all of this to collapse and every time I start to relax I keep wondering why in the world you would willingly take on this train wreck and I come up empty. It always turns bad. So yes, Jon, you need reasons.”

“I came because you asked.” It’s exactly what she wants to hear and that makes it worse. She wonders if there is any answer at all he could have given that she would have accepted and decides that there is nothing.

“That’s really not a reason.”

“Well it’s why I went. It didn’t actually occur to me not to. As for why I haven’t shoved you out the door,” He pauses and she waits. “maybe you’re as much my last bit of home as I am yours. Maybe I was too busy being relieved that I can see you and hear you and be absolutely sure you’re still here to care if you’re taking up space in my bed or whatever else you think you’re taking.” He runs a hand through his hair with a sigh. “I don’t know, Sansa. I don’t really question why I’m not doing things I don’t want to do. What am I supposed to do? Start charging you rent? I don’t need reasons to keep you around because you’re not an imposition, you’re...”

“What am I?”

“You’re Sansa Stark.” The way he says her name like it _means_ something always makes her feel a little guilty for being so willing to part with it.

“What am I to you?”

“Family. Home. I don’t know.” It’s not really anything new or even very specific but for some reason it feels warmer, more certain, and Sansa kisses him. It’s a little awkward with the amount of distance and the wolf between them and when she pulls back Jon blinks at her, confused, before smiling and moving in for another kiss.

“So. Hoarding of torches?”

“I swear there is one in every drawer. Just count how many you can see from here. What use can a person in a one bedroom possibly have for so many torches?” In every sappy rom-com and cutesy novel she has ever loved, this would be where one or both of them admits that they’ve been pining away in silence since before they can remember, or at the very least since they saw each other again in a run down diner in the Vale, and a sickly sweet relationship ensues.

What happens is more kissing and occasional exploration with hands and mouths and nothing else changes. They still go out to bars. She still forces him to dance. She still helps him pick up girls. He still never leaves with them unless Sansa is safely in a cab or with Dacey and Smalljon.

He would do the same for her if he weren’t the only man she can actually stand to let touch her.

She feels like she should feel jealous or cheated or disappointed but she mostly feels comfortable. She’s not sure she can walk into anything more defined than a ‘thing’ when bad days still mean watching for signs of an attack she knows isn’t going to come and Jon might be the most well adjusted person she knows, but that is a low bar.

It's not love. There is love there, of course there is, but it's not overwhelming or passionate or romantic. It's simple and comfortable and it lets her feel brave. She's finally allowed to feel like she can control the situation. She can touch and be touched on her own terms and that is what she needs. She doesn’t need declarations of love or promises of forever. She needs the space and time to get herself together and to a point where she doesn’t need Jon and she thinks he needs the same.

He looks at her sometimes and she knows he sees Ygritte. In her hair or when she laughs too loud or declares she can do something, stubbornly, while he shakes his head with fond amusement. She almost wants to indulge him. She could be her, has been enough girls by now that a girl he so desperately wants to see would be easy. She wouldn’t even mind doing it for him, but she knows by now that it won’t help him and she doesn’t need the therapist she’s been talking to to tell her it wouldn’t be a good idea for her either.

Jon shouldn’t date a ghost and she shouldn’t date Jon just because he’s the only one she trusts anymore, but it would be so much easier.

They never try to explain it, mostly because their entire social circle consists of her uncles, who both have the winning combination of being too closely related and not familiar enough and also in possession of an extraordinarily well founded protective streak, and Dacey and Smalljon, who Sansa insists must never know.

Then they get her drunk.

It’s a fairly easy task, considering how rarely she drinks and how puny her drink looks next to the Smalljon’s and in retrospect they probably weren’t completely in the dark to begin with.

“Oh, so ‘it’s complicated’.” Smalljon smirks, exaggerating his air quotes.

“Not particularly.” She shrugs, taking another sip before continuing, easily meeting his eyes over the rim of her glass. “We’re very very bad at communicating, and very very good at oral sex.” Smalljon’s stunned silence is interrupted by Jon choking on his beer.

“Is that so?” Dacey waggles her eyebrows salaciously even as she pounds Jon on the back harshly a few times.

“Mmmmhm.”

Jon stands before she can elaborate on her humming, blushing furiously. “And with that we are going to take off.” Jon states, grabbing Sansa’s purse and his jacket. “Because you will kill me tomorrow if I let you keep talking.” She can hear Dacey and Smalljon laughing as she waves over her shoulder.

She banishes Smalljon to the floor for movie night and refuses to share her popcorn and he keeps asking her questions about their purported skills that make her and Jon both blush for a week before the novelty wears off and Jon and Sansa go back to being something that’s nice and fully belongs to them and it’s all very easy.

He is remarkably intuitive when it comes to reading her for someone so uniquely terrible at following social cues and expressing himself.

He never holds her. She doesn’t even notice at first, but he’s always careful to never close his hands or arms around her. Even when he catches her to stop her from swatting him it’s with an open hand cradling her wrist between thumb and finger leading her arm up and away from him. It stops her from getting closer to him but it always, _always_ , leaves it open for her to move away.

She realizes it first while she has his cock in her mouth. It seems like a strange thing to notice, but she does and then it’s all she can think about. She can see his hand moving down while she licks a stripe from balls to head and she prepares herself for the feeling of fingers tangling in her hair and the pressure on the back of her head, gentler than Petyr or Harry ever were, she’s sure, but still intimidating somehow. It never comes. He sweeps her hair behind her ear and runs a thumb over her cheekbone and dances fingers along her jaw.

He never surrounds her. Even now that she’s started to hug him, lingering close and long enough for him to reciprocate his hands fall to her hips and splay wide across her back and sides but never meet behind her. He could grab or hold or maneuver her around easily but he hasn’t once, not even playfully and she feels a surge of affection for him that makes her determined that this will be the best blowjob of his life.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s just over half a year after her arrival in Riverrun that the rumours start. In hindsight it’s bordering on miraculous that it takes that long when she’s been wandering around using her own name and chatting with her closest living relatives and meeting with accountants and barristers, but when Dacey drops a torn out page of a morning paper in front of her at lunch it is still a shock to her system.

STARK HEIRESS ALIVE?

The first one is just a short blurb from the back half of the paper, speculation, the kind she’s seen a hundred times about a hundred different people and the kind she’s seen blow over within days ninety nine of those times. She’s giggled with Jeyne over the outlandish rumours of Jon Connington having turned into some kind of pirate following the revolution and she’s watched her father tense and scowl over blurry pictures of random tall people with dark hair on beaches and in bars captioned with things like ' _Brandon Stark enjoying death?'_ and coupled with theories on how he saw an out from his responsibilities and took it. She convinces herself they will lose interest.

The second is a headline, front page, with a picture of her leaving her uncles’ home, and from there the tabloids grab on with both hands and pull, tearing at every little detail they can find.

Petyr would tell her to keep on top of it all, control the flow of information.

Cersei would revel in it.

Her mother would tell her to smile, be polite, pretend they were just distant acquaintances, and go about her business.

So Sansa ignores it all. She refuses to see any of it. She dons the blinkers her mother helped her create when men with cameras had started appearing at events just to watch them come and go, in case one of them started showing signs of being more interesting than their father. Ned Stark had been a constant source of disappointment to the press after Brandon the wild child media darling and Lyanna the walking scandal who bucked societal expectations at every turn. Even Rickard had been hotheaded enough to make waves every now and then.

This is not new. This is what normal used to be. And now she is old enough, and everyone knows she must be damaged enough, to do something truly shocking. She enjoys imagining their disappointment as she spends all her time with the same five people and never goes anywhere farther than the park.

Falling back into habits from her childhood doesn’t come as easily as she expects it to. The situation feels so familiar that it confuses her how ill-fitting her old persona has become after years of twisting and molding to fit other people’s plans for her. Somewhere at the back of her mind she has kept the idea of Old-Sansa who is none of the things she’s ashamed of, still her parents’ perfect little lady, but life does not have save points and she can’t undo the years of layering discretion over prudence over courtesy until it became deception because she could never lie until she unlearned where to draw the lines. It was less like walking a path backwards and more like picking all the beads and sequins off one of her costumes and expecting the fabric underneath to have remained intact.

Jon fidgets whenever he spots one of them, keeping a hand at her back and casting suspicious glances over his shoulder in a way that reminds her that they might have grown up together, but they did not grow up the same. Jon was always on the outskirts, his inclusion usually just a byproduct of being close to Robb or father. By the time everything really picked up last time he was tucked away in training.

Dacey finds it all endlessly amusing, dropping comments like ‘ _hang on, we should take a picture, Sansa’s eating_ scones _, the public will want to know, Jon_ ’, but she hands over her spare key, just in case, and once Sansa indicates she doesn’t want to know she doesn’t mention anything she reads other than to point out that it’s all ridiculous.

The Smalljon punches a photographer aiming his camera at their bedroom window and gives the single least sincere apology Sansa has ever heard. All he says as Sansa runs an antibacterial wipe over his knuckles is: “I really didn’t miss these guys.”

She’s in a diner with a few of the girls from work the first time she sees her own face on TV. The sound isn’t on loud enough to hear but her face is followed by Robb’s wildly passionate one, an old clip she could recite verbatim, and then a picture of her father and it isn’t hard to figure out what’s being said. She barely makes it back to the flat and she can’t make herself leave and she feels utterly pathetic spending an entire day hiding under the covers like her sweet baby brothers but she can’t move.

It has all mostly settled down, or they’ve settled down around the ruckus, by the time she finds the picture frame on the table.

“I thought you might like this one. I know there’s not a lot left.” Jon says, by way of explanation, when he sees her staring at it, and he’s right. Sansa has what was on her phone when she left home, in all their grainy, blurry, 1.3 megapixel glory, and not much else. She was excited to leave, why would she take family photos with her? She was supposed to be able to come home. She hasn’t been back to Winterfell, but it was levelled not long after Ned Stark’s death, by Theon Greyjoy of all people, and it seems unlikely that her mother’s precious family albums survived when no one managed to save her brothers.

It’s a picture from maybe three months before they all started leaving Winterfell. Speed and figure skating had district championships the same weekend, in the same place, and a local paper managed to catch the moment Sansa crashed into Robb and he swung her around when he met her outside the indoor rink where her competition had been held, all matching beaming smiles above matching gleaming gold medals.

“You have no idea how jealous I used to be of you and Robb.”

“We did rather get everything, didn’t we?” She learned to acknowledge the silver spoon she was born with sometime between being pulled from a float into an angry mob and dying her hair brown in a motel bathroom on her way to the Eyrie.

“Not that.” She raises an eyebrow and he shrugs. “I mean yeah, that. But something else too. You both had this idealistic view on everything and it was like you could shape the world to fit it with willpower alone and you could look at people and see every good thing about them. People used to trip all over themselves trying to make you look at them with that look,” He motions to the identical grins fixed on paper. “like they were something just spectacular, but you and Robb, it was a constant thing. Every time you looked at him he was some legendary hero and he looked at you like he couldn’t imagine you would fail. You were always so proud of each other, going to take on the world and win.”

She can’t hold back the snort then. “And then we met the world and it crushed us soundly under its boot without blinking.”

“It hasn’t crushed you yet. It hasn’t crushed Robb either. Robb had a cause, a mission. As long as it doesn’t die with him he’ll live forever.”

“Robb _was_ the cause.” Correcting him feels like a punch to the gut because having a part of her beloved big brother survive is such a sweet prospect. “Nothing changed. I don’t know if Dacey has told you yet today, but the North still isn’t independent. Lannister money still decides where power goes, what right is, who deserves to live. Turns out willpower didn’t do it.”

The bitterness on her tone has no visible effect on Jon’s intensity. “When I came to pick you up, in the Vale, you looked at me like that. Like I was Robb right after he won something you always knew he would win. Proud and completely unsurprised and somehow still disbelieving.”

“Well you did do exactly the fantastic thing I knew you were going to do so that sounds accurate.”

She’s known this conversation was coming for too long to be quite as surprised as she is, but he’s looking at her in that way that makes her want to do things she’s entirely sure are ill advised, like reviving the campaign her brother started. “You’re still everything you were then with experience to back you up. His willpower didn’t get him all the way, but the two of you together? That’s magic.”

Except it wouldn’t be her and Robb together. It would be Sansa and Robb’s ghost and Robb’s friends and Robb’s mission and Robb’s everything except Robb himself.

“You actually think I can do this.”

“Of course I do.” Flat and matter of fact and without a second’s hesitation, just like her Jon. Nothing like _their_ Jon. Jon at Winterfell had never been entirely confident about anything.

“I’m not Robb, Jon. He inspired people, they followed him because they wanted to. I just danced.”

“And Robb just played rugby, until he didn’t. People followed Ned Stark’s son before they followed Robb Stark, and they’d follow Robb Stark’s sister until they’re ready to follow Sansa Stark. They don’t know you yet but you are not less than Robb or your father. You’re not a dancer anymore Sansa, and you’re restless.” He’s not wrong. He rarely is about her. She’s been building up walls and preparing herself to go out and face the world again since the world started looking like it might come knocking and it’s been sort of aimless so far but Jon is right. She’s always been determined and she needs a goal.

“Why have you never taken up the fight? I mean you’re the natural choice, northernest northerner ever, experienced commander. Robb would have trusted you with it.”

“He probably would have, and he’d be wrong. I’m not that kind of commander. Organizing and delegating I can do, but recruiting and convincing and charming people, dealing with politicians, no. Besides, when I headed back south I wasn’t really in much of a state to be leading anyone anywhere. I came here looking for you and Arya, you know, and I just kind of stuck around. I had nothing to go on so I figured, next of kin, they’d be the first to hear. I’m doing what I’m good at here. Always been more of a soldier than anything.”

“Good at underestimating yourself is what you are, but you do a lot of good here, who’s to say you couldn’t do the same there? People love you.”

“Not the people you need. I’m still not sure I’d leave alive if you ever put me and the Greatjon in a room together, and the Manderlys and Glovers aren’t much fonder of me. I made choices and I stand by them, but there is no way in any of the seven hells that northerners are following my lead anywhere. Some of them may well burn rather than follow me out of a fire.”

“You make them sound like such reasonable people, way to get me pumped to work with them.” Her sarcasm does not dent his triumph at her implication. For all that he has gained confidence in their years apart he has never left behind the sense of shock and awe that seems to overtake him every time something goes his way.

“Oh please, like you ever doubted how stubborn they are. They’re good people and they love your family. Besides, you don’t want reasonable people, you want people who will let a twenty one year old woman with no political experience lead them through the maelstrom that is our system of governance.”

“You are terrible at pep talks.”

“Which is why they’re your job.”

“Such an arse. Remind me why I talk to you?”

“Because you have no other friends?” He grins and dodges her attempt to punch him in the shoulder.

Dacey and Smalljon greet the news with an endless series of increasingly ludicrous toasts and enough pats on the back for Jon to confirm that however ernest, his gentle nudging had not been entirely his own idea. She smiles at him to reassure him that she knows this manipulation has her best interests in mind.

In the midst of the flurry of letters and phone calls and emails and general chaos that comes with reassembling the scattered campaign she allows herself to realise something she’s known but ignored. If they’re going to accomplish anything they’re going to do it in King’s Landing. She is going to do it in King's Landing. Without a change there all they will ever be is a band of rebels and activists and while it suits them, they want a nation.

Sansa prepares herself for the place that still haunts her nightmares while their work gains more publicity and suddenly she’s making speeches and taking interviews becoming ever more annoyed at being styled ‘the last Stark’.

“Last time I checked, I have a sister.” She almost snaps at a reporter who says it to her face but she manages to force her tone into something pleasant and keeps her smile soft and only her friends seem to notice the chill in her eyes when the interview plays across the screen of their temporary headquarters.

She has a sister, and when Arya finds her way home, Sansa will be there.

King’s Landing isn’t an insurmountable distance. The thought crosses her mind while Jon hands her a mug of tea as they settle in to watch a movie. The drive is longer than to the vale but the roads are better and daytrips are not out of the question. Scheduling and timetables and long weekends and just the prospect of Jon keeps injecting themselves into her plans every time they sit down to dinner or curl up in bed and she refuses to lose focus.

It’s entirely too tempting to grab onto her relationship with Jon and make it a fixed point to anchor herself to so Sansa doubles down on the lack of structure. It’s the kind of distance that would eat at a new relationship. Every time they were too tired to make the trek there would be doubts and frustrations and it’s better to try and get one thing off the ground at a time and this time it is not going to be them.

There is no margin of error for her to be comfortable. She can’t stand the look Jon gets when she fails to shed her armour with him and she can’t afford to be caught without it there and she’s not adept enough at switching between the two yet. There is too much risk and she doesn’t need to say much for Jon to smile and tell her to go take on the world and she pushes her silent worry to the back of her mind with everything else.

Jon doesn’t need to be taken care of the way Sansa sometimes does when everything becomes too much. No one has ever had to goad him into eating. He sleeps and eats and works and laughs and does all the things people are supposed to do without anyone keeping an eye on him. He never stops caring for himself. Sometimes he stops caring about himself though.

It didn’t happen often at first, even if it did Sansa had been blinded by the shine of the white knight role she had assigned him, but once her feet stand more solidly on the ground she can see how shaky his own stance can be.

He has the constant need to feel useful and sometimes delegating from behind a desk does not fulfill that need.

She can’t help but feel apprehensive about what he might do if she confirms that she would be fine without him.

He gets so reckless.

She would though, be fine, she reflects to herself, staring at him as he keeps his eyes firmly on the road for the entire drive to the capital. For the first time in far too long she doesn’t feel like she could be shattered into a million pieces by the next strong gust of wind to blow her way. She wants to stop him when he shrugs his jacket on to leave. She wants to get in the car with him and put the imposing red fortress on the hill in the rear view. She doesn’t _need_ to.

Once she settles her things into the sparse apartment she fires off a few texts and checks her perpetually full inbox and then dials Jon, backs out of the app, and snaps a picture of the view from her breakfast bar over her immaculately styled living room with it’s uncomfortable couch and her four framed photos.

It takes Jon just over a minute to send her a picture of Ghost staring at the brass handle of their front door.

Margaery finds her before anyone else notes her presence in the city and she looks exactly as she always has, the epitome of feminine grace with a warm and welcoming air and a gaggle of friends lingering nearby.

Something about the sharpness in her eyes and the way her smile freezes ever so slightly now and then tells Sansa that whatever the Tyrells had planned, it had not gone quite right. Or maybe this was accounted for and the guarded look in the eye of their prized golden rose was a predetermined cost they were willing to pay.

She knows now that Margaery always acts more out of ambition than altruism, but hers is never a cruel ambition and Sansa is grateful that the first test of her new armour is a sparring match rather than a duel. Nevertheless, friends or not, they are now on different sides. They always were, in a sense, but last time they met Sansa was too concerned with survival to consider fighting for anything else. This time Sansa is corralling anti-Lannister sentiment and Margaery is one of their closest supporters, much too far involved in everything they are now to pull back from them.

It is still a sweet thing to have, Margaery’s friendship, careful and closed off though it may be, and Sansa treasures it. There is an agreement, as silent as everything of consequence between them is, to do for each other what they can without risk to themselves. It is not much to the loyalty of her northmen or Marge’s own roses, but it is honest and their own in a way they both know very little truly is.

Navigating the plains proves both more draining and easier than she could have expected.

 _Starks aren’t just old money, they’re older_ than _money._

It’s something Theon used to say that springs to mind every time she invokes her name to open doors even money can’t budge. Half derision, half envy, all truth. Starks have been inhabiting the North long enough that no one can say with any confidence who the first was and they’ve held positions of power for almost as long. She isn’t the last Stark, but she is, and they can’t ignore her. They can mutter and try to shake her and find endless reasons not to take her seriously, but they cannot dismiss her outright, not after all they’ve done.

She even has the press on her side, more fickle than any Tyrell though they may be. The novelty of her return hasn’t quite worn off and there is still an appetite for invasions of her privacy that come with sympathy and understanding and, more than anything, attention. She becomes loud and has learned to direct her voice at all the right people and places.

Sansa and Jon are proud. There is little room for anything else for now, but she knows he is proud of her and she is as proud of him as she was when he first told her what he was doing to set her mother’s burning home to rights after years of riots and attacks. They speak almost daily but she misses being affectionate and being comfortable and being _there_. For now she has his pride to carry with her.

She hasn’t worn a dress like the one Margaery presents her with since before the Eyrie, has avoided black tie and grand events for as long as she could now that she’s back, but she’s been invited to speak and she can’t not. There are people she loathes with every fiber of her being that she cannot dismiss because she has sworn to do all she can.

There are also people who she has never given a thought to who can do worse.

There is a quiet moment while everyone is eating where a woman she vaguely recognizes takes the stage and starts rambling on about Starks and the north and Sansa throws a confused look over at the host because she’s not supposed to speak yet and then the woman gives a dramatic flourish, waving someone up on stage and says: “Please welcome Arya Stark.”

It couldn’t be, Sansa thinks. If Arya came back she would go to Jon, but then Jon would be harder to find, Sansa was all over the news. But she wouldn’t be caught dead at an event like this, unless this was the only place she knew for sure her sister would be. She tries to shove the hope down and keep her expression neutral but Margaery’s hand gripping hers discreetly but tightly under the table tells her she fails.

The girl is Arya’s age. She might even look like her. The hair is right and the face is long and the nose is familiar. She is not Arya.

She cannot fathom why anyone would do this, what they could possibly gain from it and then she pinches down hard on the skin on the inside of her wrist because she’s forgetting herself. She’s spent too much time with Jon and she’s started to believe people need a reason to hurt her, that her pain isn’t gain enough for the people who watched her fall apart with mild disinterest when she was a naive child.

There is no one in the room who could not see the benefit in her exposing weakness.

When she comes home hours later with a smile that feels so fixed she’s not sure it will ever come off and discovers her lights on and her tea made she doesn’t know whether to thank the live broadcast or Margaery’s propensity for discreet texting.

It’s closer to dawn than she would like when his gentle murmuring and ridiculous jokes manage to get her face release it’s forced pleasant smile and she tugs him into a hug, pressing her face to his neck and she suddenly feels so tired she can’t speak.

“Well I’d say today took a nice turn.” Jon mutters, pressing a kiss into her hairline as she wraps herself around him. “I woke up missing you and I get to fall asleep as close to you as I can possibly be.”

“That is a defeatist attitude and I will have none of it.” She frowns, discontented and already half asleep, before ridding him of his shirt and herself of her remaining clothes (gown and hose having been discarded for comfort hours before) and burrowing into his chest, nearly purring at the warmth as a chuckle rumbles under the skin.

When she blinks awake to the realisation that her morning is free and she has Jon and they have hours she presses a kiss near his clavicle. “I love you so much.”

“I love you.” He always says I love you, never with a too at the end. He thinks it makes it feel too much like an afterthought or obligatory response and suddenly Sansa is up and out of bed.

Jon always seems to end up closer than she has consciously let him.

“I am so sorry, that was so rude.” She blurts out, her feet carrying her around the room without her permission.

“Did you say rude?” Her abrupt departure from the bed obviously sent the signal that something was about to happen and she almost stops her pacing to kiss the - adorable - confused look off his face as he scratches at the back of his neck, sitting up to face her. Almost.

“Oh gods. I can’t believe I said that, that I did that. I was the one who insisted we weren’t going to be serious. I mean it’s the very height of rudeness.”

“I do not remember the part of Madame Mordane’s lessons where she mentioned arrangements of casual sex.” He looks torn between panic and amusement. “Then again you did have a lot more lessons with her than we did and we did always kind of wonder how many etiquette rules there could possibly be.”

“Just altering set parameters like that. Ones _I_ set, no less. It’s not even like I showed up to a diner in a cocktail dress — it’s like I sent out invitations with business casual and then wore a ball gown. It makes everyone uncomfortable.”

“You did hear me say it back, right? We’ve both said it before.” And that is the problem. She doesn’t need Jon’s baffled looks to tell her she’s making no sense but she’s making observations on how Jon _always_ says ‘I love you’ and they have hitched the cart before a horse Sansa has sworn up and down was staying in his box.

“This is different, Jon.” Sansa had pressed pause and even at the back of her mind accepted that when she was ready to unpause he might have moved on. Then she had sat on the remote and now she’s missed it. I love you (because she always has) became I Love you, and she doesn’t know when.

“Sure. How?”

“It just is. See? You’re uncomfortable. I told you.”

“I’m not uncomfortable because you said you love me.” He’s finally managed to stop her and pull her down to sit facing him on the bed. “That part was fine, great even. It’s the part where I’m now not sure if you’re breaking up with me or telling me we should nix the whole no label thing and just get together I’m not loving.”

“Why would I break up with you?” She can’t quite believe that the thought had genuinely never occurred to her. For all her panic and mental preparation for losing him, she’s never considered leaving him.

“I don’t know. If that’s not where this is going though, then I am not uncomfortable so you weren’t rude. Really, your metaphorical ball gown looks great and no one was offended, and we can go back to bed and set new parameters in the morning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to say I have a good excuse for the delay, but actually school started and I forgot this was a thing I was doing. I'm just going to end this here, but thank you to anyone who joined me into my first foray into multi-chapterdom.


End file.
